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By Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, Crown Publishing
Reviewed by John Bacher, a St. Catharines, Ontario environmental activist.
With the horrific war that has erupted across the Middle East after the massacres of October 7, 2023, The Future of Peace is the epitome of what the situation requires at this exact moment in time. The catastrophic events that occurred in Gaza resulted in terrible chasms between the worlds of Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and are now deeper and more difficult to bridge than ever before.
In the tragic context of two-and-a-half years of bitter regional war, The Future of Peace reignites hope in what seems like an impossible dream of restoring peace. It is written by Jewish author Maoz Inon from the Gaza Borderlands, whose family bore the brunt of the Hamas-directed slaughter, and Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died in cruel circumstances while in the custody of the Israeli Defence Force on a minor stone-throwing charge. Both are co-founders of Mejdi Tours, whose name means “honour” in Arabic. Operating in Israel and Palestine, the company always has companion Jewish and Palestinian guides and works on building peace. The authors stress that part of the challenge is for each side to recognize the legitimacy of each other’s pain. This book is a vivid example of how this can happen.
The authors Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon are co-founders of Inter-Act International, a nonprofit dedicated to Middle East Peace. They are part of a heroic but sadly, mostly ignored peacebuilding tradition that unites Jewish and Palestinian peace activists. The constant challenge to peacebuilders like Sarah and Inon is when hard-liners inclined to violence and extremism are threatened by them and deny their existence.
One organization, but sadly short-lived, was Olive Groves Without Borders, which was a joint Jewish-Palestinian group made up of three thousand farmers. The disruption of Palestinian cultivation of olive orchards in the West Bank because of the illegal actions of extremist settlers is one of the many tragic features of this war.
At its height, the authors note that Olive Groves Without Borders “pumped nearly ninety million dollars into the Palestinian economy.” The organization laments that they were “forced to fold in 2018, when the first Trump administration cut funding for all Palestinian aid projects and peacebuilding initiatives.”
One functioning peacebuilding group which I discovered through reading The Future of Peace is Combatants for Peace. Its Jewish founder Chen Alon, whose disgust arose when as an IDF soldier in January 2002 “his unit was ordered to demolish a lessly feared for his safety.” The prejudices which kept him back quickly began to melt away once he saw how polite some of his fellow bus passengers were. The authors gleefully recall how he saw young men quickly jump up to help older women as they got on the bus and to offer them the best seats. “Afterwards Scott felt a moral obligation to quit his comfortable job in a bank and dedicate his life to the mission of peace.” He became a researcher with the US Institute, which sadly, although the authors do not mention this, has been disrupted in the second term of US President Donald Trump.
In so many ways Sarah and Inon correct simplistic narratives that block peace as effectively as hardening of the arteries causes dementia by retarding the flow of blood to the brain. One moving way is how they put into context the hateful 1929 massacre in Hebron of an ancient Jewish community. The authors bring out what is not widely known. Although some perished, most of the community, more than 400 people, were rescued by 28 Palestinian families who opened the doors of their homes to shelter Jewish families.
The reason The Future Is Peace needs to be read and acted upon is summed up well by the Reform American Rabbi Paula Marcus, who has worked closely with the authors in their educational missions. She laments how, “Being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian has become like spectators supporting a football game.” Readers of The Future Is Peace will give up such tiresome sports and work for solutions based on peace, mutual respect, human rights, and trust.